


By the dying light

by cyan96



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Supernatural
Genre: Gen, criminal minds season 4-5 - Freeform, leviathans-freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21893884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyan96/pseuds/cyan96
Summary: Three days out and the child had still yet to wake. The shell of his body was an unconscious weight suspended over the shoulders of Michael's vessel, breathing softly. The shell of his head slumped in the gleam of twilight. It was late again: another solar cycle passed. The warmth of the sun had leeched to the moon's cold illumination and distant stars' light, their pulse singing a song that dripped into the tattered crevasses of Michael's wings.(Michael gets out of hell, Adam in tow. This solves less problems than one would think. The world is still ending, Michael's grace is malfunctioning, and there is, apparently, a serial killer stalking Adam's remaining family.)
Relationships: Michael & Adam Milligan, Michael/Adam Milligan
Comments: 11
Kudos: 119





	By the dying light

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a (very very) early draft of A coal in a hearth, relit, before I added 5 plot-threads and decided to redo all my character relationships. It's a much smaller and more self-contained story, despite functioning on the same premise lines, and I was inspired to continue it after 15.08. Not sure how often its going to update, since It is a backburner project. But I hope you guys enjoy!

Three days out and the child had still yet to wake. The shell of his body was an unconscious weight suspended over the shoulders of Michael's vessel, breathing softly. The shell of his head slumped in the gleam of twilight. It was late again: another solar cycle passed. The warmth of the sun had leeched to the moon's cold illumination and distant stars' light, their pulse singing a song that dripped into the tattered crevasses of Michael's wings. 

He walked. 

The trail was a barely there scrape of dirt and grass, gone in the places where the forest had intruded. Every few minutes Michael adjusted his grip on the child slung over his back, ducking low underneath an obtrusive canopy or stepping sideways around the upturned roots of a fallen oak, lifting branches that threatened to whiplash. Avoiding the hazards of the forest took time he did not have, but it was necessary: the boy had nearly been whacked twice already. And the precision of Grace required to heal was beyond Michael at the moment, insomuch as the precision to fly without the unwelcome possibility of landing in an alternate reality. Or a black hole. 

For now his current vessel was the transport he had. 

It had been three days. They were close. Just beyond the forest ecosystem, the weight of a city rose in the distance: two hundred thousand human souls compressed to ninety square miles of concrete and electricity, glass and pollution, the asphalt tar of sin. It would only a matter of hours before it was reached.

Michael walked. The deer trail trail curved to a steadier road. The road split into a highway, its black surface gilded with the sheen of streetlamps. _Madison, Wisconsin_ , said a sign, the lettering made in neons. It told Michael nothing his internal compass didn’t already know. Another hour, and the scatterings of suburbia dotted the horizon. He traded gravel for sidewalk, proceeded with a steady purpose. Went past suburbia proper and into the dense configuration of the city, emptied with the night and smelling of gas exhaust.

In the interim the child stirred only once. His eyelids, flickering, paper thin. He did not wake. Not unexpected. Underneath his skin his soul was a ball of coruscating light, a vivid apricot apart from the hairline fractures, sealed with the gleam of Michael's own grace. It buzzed, bewildered, restless. Too long spent outside the confines of a body and its human skin was unfamiliar to it now, a difficulty in reintegration, but it was settling. And the body was a perfect replica down to the memory of Detroit cemetery dirt crumbling from the soles of the child's shoes. 

He entered the hospital at four in the morning. A handful of stragglers lingered in the ER waiting room. A triage nurse sat behind a desk, soul the quiet blue of a woodland stream. He shifted the child so that one hand was free to rap on the plastic. 

Said, brusque and curt, when they looked up: 

"The boy needs a bed." And then--frowned, minutely; his vessel's voice was strange, as if it had been consuming large quantities of gravel. He brushed it aside. "And for his family to be contacted." 

The police station had been of a shorter distance. Michael knew enough of current human society to know they would have made the necessary and revelant arrangements. But it seemed unlikely the station would have had beds, which the hospital, from second-hand memory, kept stocked in abundance. Better here, with the child still insensate to the world. 

The hospital staff came in a swirl like an electron cloud. They loaded the child onto a stretcher and asked Michael many questions, most of them nonsense. He followed the stretcher down the hall and parked himself in the waiting room as the physician and nurses did their tests, watching through the walls at the shadows of body heat. Hospital etiquette was strange and familiar at once, the lines of a guidebook, now put into experience. Michael waited with impatience.

When the tests were done the physician stepped straight for Michael. There was a curious expression on his face. "I'm sorry, your friend—" 

"My ward," Michael recifitied.

A pause. The head cocked. The soul, gentling, with a strange and careful sympathy. "Right, 'course sir." 

There were terms and explanations after that: coma, minimal brain activity. Two sentences in Michael stopped listening, rose from his seat. There was nothing wrong with the child, physically. Their results were irrelevant. In due time he would wake on his own, after his soul reintegrated, but that was unlikely to go over as an explanation to creatures who hadn't yet figured out atomic transmutation and seemed to have forgotten his Father's written word. 

The door to the boy's room was opened. Presumably that meant he was allowed to go in. 

"--lifesupport. But we have little way to estimate when or if he might--"

"Have you contacted his family?" Michael interrupted. Everything else was noensense.

The physician paused. A no. Maybe Michael should have gone with the police station after all. Then he said: "We were going to ask you about that, actually," and trailed after Michael as he entered the boy's room. "He didn't come in with any kind of ID, and he's not exactly in a state to answer questions. We were wondering if you could give us an identification-- his dental records are still processing-- so that we can get his emergency contacts here."

A plastic chair had been put next to the bed. Michael pulled it out, sat down. They had stripped the child of his former clothing, placed him in a thin white shift under thin white blankets. His soul was beginning to seep into his cells proper now: heart, lungs, the soft tissues of the brain. It glowed warm from the recognition of an old home.

Michael braced his elbows on his knees, settling in for the wait. He brushed the hair from the boy's eyes.

"His name is Adam," he said.

**Author's Note:**

> if there's anything you enjoyed, do let me know in the comments!


End file.
